I want to get rid of my Hue bridge and Xiaomi gateway and therefore thinking of bying a Raspbee or Conbee for my Raspberry Pi 3B+.
I just don´t know which is best suitable and easy to set up. I am using Hassbian.
What about covering range for ZigBee? I guess all Hue bulbs uses mesh so that is not a problem but what about the Xiaomi products with batteries. I have 2 gateways at the moment for covering both floors of the house.
I can not tell you which is better or easier to setup, however I’m using a ConBee stick for a few months now and it works perfectly for me.
If you have hue bulbs or other main powered devices, the range shouldn’t be a problem, because each main powered device extends the range, so if there is a hue bulb close to your battery powered Xiaomi sensor, the sensor can connect to the bulb and the signal will hop via the bulb to the ConBee stick (or to other devices and then to the ConBee stick).
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Are you using it with a raspberry pi?
I did not know that products from different manufactures could interconnect.on the zigbee Network.
What procedure did you follow to make it Work on the pi?
I’m using it on a Intel NUC and I’m running it inside docker.
On the homepage of the ConBee product you find the installation instructions for a raspberry pi:
After you’ve installed deCONZ software you can head over to the components documentation from home assistant.
If you should have any problem setting this up, you can post your errors here and I will try to help you.
ZigBee devices don’t care from which manufacturer the other devices are as long as they follow the same ZigBee standard. Main powered devices act as a repeater they simply forward the message from the sensor to the hub or to the next bulb and then to the hub. Main powered devices also extend the device limit of the hub, which is I think 32 devices for deconz.
I advise you to check if all the components you are currently using are supported by the ConBee stick.
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thanks for the information.
I somewhere read that the antenna should be better on the raspbee, but the conbee on the other hand can be used on other products than the pi… difficult 
i use conbee, not limited to having to use an rpi. It’s in one of the loft rooms of a large victorian house where even the internal walls are 15cm of solid brick and plaster. There’s zigbee devices spread around the house and the mesh has no problem with controlling devices three floors down in the cellar.
I wouldn’t worry too much about range so long as you have a decent number of powered devices.
I’m curious why zigbee2mqtt isn’t in the race. ?
I was faced with the same question (raspbee vs. conbee) and decided on the conbee.
Two reasons:
- the raspbee may reduce pi’s wifi quality as the antennas (raspbee’s and the pi’s) are very close to each other. That’s what other people report.
- the conbee can be used on PCs too, while the raspbee is limited to pi-devices
I am using the conbee in combination with deconz for about five months without any problems.
so I guess range should not be a problem
I don´t use wifi for my pi but I see the point.
I see the advantage of using the conbee when maybe sometime switching to another platform.
No other reason than not having heard very much about it. WHat is the advantage of using this solution instead? How about stability?
I use MQTT for my Sonoffs and this seem pretty stable.
I was just curious. I don’t know much about anything other than zigbee2mqtt since that’s all I’ve used.
One thing, with raspbee you will be stuck with a raspberry pi to run it. With conbee, it is usb based and will work with an x86 computer if you want to upgrade to a NUC or similar.
is it stable and what about installation and configuarion?
So just to be sure. Using a Conbee would actually be an advantage because all devices are then on the same Network and therefor able for lets say xiaomi battery driven products to connect through philips hue bulbs, where now the xiaomi products only can connect through the xiaomi gateway?
Does the Conbee support Philips Hue transition? (fade)
What are you asking? Zigbee2MQTT is well documented.
Theoretically yes. In practice there are sometimes incompatibilities that are awfully hard to diagnose. This is especially so as devices often take a while to pair.
Zigbee2mqtt has been solid for me. Docs are fine and lots of activity by the developers expanding and fixing and improving.
Okay, I will look around.
Is there an advantage in choosing Zigbee2MQTT instead of Conbee? Is it more stable?
For me the connection between hue bulbs and xiaomi sensors works very well.
Yes, the ConBee supports transition.
Regarding ZigBee2MQTT vs. DeConz, I think they are both on approx. the same level at the moment. I don’t think you can say one is more stable than the other. Read up on both and decide for yourself.
Also check out this discussion on this topic: https://www.reddit.com/r/homeassistant/comments/akyr55/zigbee2mqtt_cc2531_vs_raspbee_premium_zigbee_addon/
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